Our End Has Brought the Spring by Cat Dixon

Imagining the world of the Third Reich, Cat Dixon’s bold new collection explores the dreams, death wishes, and desires of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s longtime companion. In Dixon’s lush lines, Eva is no woman easily kept to rules or Nazi law. She warns Hitler, “you like my kisses. So don’t tell me don’t,” considers sleeping with his jeweled gifts as one would a pet, and contemplates the temptations of petty revenge. These are fierce poems, bristling with seduction, feminine power, and want. To read Our End Has Brought the Spring, asks us to be thrilled and chilled, to hear the voice that called Hitler love.

–Laura Madeline Wiseman

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Cat Dixon’s Eva Braun reveals, not only the “banality of evil” anatomized by Hannah Arendt, but also its flirtatiousness, erotic magnetism, petulance and petty rebellions, its brash pride and self-assertion. This Eva alternately embraces and tenderly solaces the monster who is her paramour, and she is fully conscious of “children turned to ash, / bones stacked up like hills.” With a Keatsian negative capability, Dixon has brought her Eva to vivid, full-bodied life, only to sacrifice her, in a Stravinsky-esque rite, to “[bring] the spring.” In doing so, she gifts us with an intimate portrait of evil. And like Baudelaire, who also brought “flowers” from “evil,” Dixon forces us to admit that, if we are unwilling to see something of Eva in ourselves, we are “hypocrite readers.”

–Clif Mason